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Monday, December 11, 2017

Welcome to the Launching Technology Ventures (LTV) blog! We (Jeff Bussgang and Jeffrey Rayport) teach this class to second year MBA students at HBS each year to help better prepare them as founders, to start their own companies, or as joiners, to join a start up, typically in a product management, marketing/growth or business development role. We do not focus on raising capital as there are other courses at HBS that do so.The class is taught using the case method, which eschews the classic lecture-style format and, instead, puts the student in the role of decision-maker when there is no clear, "right" answer. The goal of the class is to focus on the practical tools required to conceive, build and launch a startup - particularly pre product-market fit startups. Thus, the focus of the class tends to be more tactical than strategic. The class meets twice per week and runs for seven weeks (i.e., fourteen sessions). In each session, we focus on the experiments that startups run - whether they are customer value proposition experiments, business model experiments or go to market experiments - and how to be more effective at running those experiments in a startup environment. You can see the schedule of sessions and guests that attend the class to help us bring the case to life in the tab above labeled "LTV Course Schedule". There are supplemental readings that we assign to each case to help round out the students' exposure to the topic at hand, which can be seen in the tab above labeled "LTV Readings".2018 is the seventh year for Jeff B. and third year for Jeffrey R. in teaching the class, which was created in partnership with Professor Tom Eisenmann. In past years, we assign a paper instead of a final exam, which often is delivered in the form of a blog post. Those posts are accessible from the tab "Archive" above.Enjoy!